Alpha-2-macroglobulin as a radioprotective agent: a review.

作者：Xueying Chen, Xiangbo Kong, Zhaoqiang Zhang, Wei Chen, Jieyu Chen, Huanyang Li, Wanting Cao, Yaping Ge, Silian Fang · 发表于：PubMed · 年份：2014 · DOI：10.3978/j.issn.1000-9604.2014.09.04 · 被引用次数：27 · 研究领域：Effects of Radiation Exposure、Oral health in cancer treatment、Childhood Cancer Survivors' Quality of Life

Radiation is an important modality in cancer treatment, and eighty percent of cancer patients need radiotherapy at some point during their clinical management. However, radiation-induced damage to normal tissues restricts the therapeutic doses of radiation that can be delivered to tumours and thereby limits the effectiveness of the treatment. The use of radioprotectors represents an obvious strategy to obtain better tumour control using a higher dose in radiotherapy. However, most of the synthetic radioprotective compounds studied have shown inadequate clinical efficacy owing to their inherent toxicity and high cost. Hence, the development of radioprotective agents with lower toxicity and an extended window of protection has attracted a great deal of attention, and the identification of alternative agents that are less toxic and highly effective is an absolute necessity. Recent studies have shown that alpha-2-macroglobulin (α2M) possesses radioprotective effects. α2M is a tetrameric, disulfide-rich plasma glycoprotein that functions as a non-selective inhibitor of different types of non-specific proteases and as a carrier of cytokines, growth factors, and hormones. α2M induces protein factors whose interplay underlies radioprotection, which supports the idea that α2M is the central effector of natural radioprotection in the rat. Pretreatment with α2M has also induced a significant reduction of irradiation-induced DNA damage and the complete restoration of liver and body weigh...